Oct 14 2011:
i think it essential that all human knowledge should become free by whatever means necessary, after all is it our human right to have access to all the knowledge humans have obtained we evolves and survived as species because we shared information with each other, our ancestors had the right idea, so shouldn't we go with what worked and take a lesson from our ancestors and share all the knowledge with have with each other?

Oct 16 2011:
The idea is good, but implementation might be harder than you think. The basic infrastructure necessary for this idea to work doesn't exist in most poverty stricken countries. In developing countries that do have the infrastructure, it becomes an issue of a lack of availability of the infrastructure to everyone. The problem with trying to give free online education to people riddled with poverty is that they have no way of accessing it.

That being said, I do believe the concept of e-learning is really simple. Lecturers and professors film their lectures and post them online on a student portal for the students to download. This could be supplemented with a live camera feed for Q&A with the lecturers. Tests and quizzes pose a slight problem because of dishonesty when taking a test at home in front of your computer. Assignments are posted online for students to download and then an upload facility can be used for submission. Most universities already employ this exact system as a free service to students in the form of a student portal.

Another potential problem is the funding. If the university is a global offering, then where will funding come from? State and community colleges are government subsidised, but if the online university were to be global which government would subsidise it? How would the equipment, facilities and servers to host everything be paid for? Who would pay the lecturers?

People should accept that we have to learn for life and not only for a piece of paper (degree).
Going to school and university makes people to experts in selecting the facts they need to pass
their exams and finally get a degree, but many lack the understanding to structure new information
or put it into context, because lessons and lectures are more and more often focussed on preparing
for a particular exam (good statistics to sell the course!!!) than on creating a real understanding ...
Education has become a business and teaching how to learn & think would create students/citizens
that are self sufficient learners and not potential customers for another course. Politicians in general
are also not interested in an aware / curious population that might start asking questions...

Another problem is the raidly growing amount of knowledge in nearly all areas
but for budget reasons the lectures have to do more and more administrative tasks etc. ...

Nov 13 2011:
I really like what DANI DAYAN said in his comment and its true that if anyone provide a free online education then one should also watch behind for answering Q&A of students and the next important think should be a projectes.
If one used to give project after each session so student gets a opportunity of learning from projectes which he/she could complete with the help of session they attended .
And as i am student of 3D animation i know how project helps to improve and we also learn new thinks from them.

The greatest problem in this era of informationalism is lack of structure and context for all the conflicting bits of information thrown at us and when you try to access real research that lets you build that structure and context, you need a paid subscription or various authorizations to access a given library -- not to mention copyright issues that limit international access to online videos from a given country or simply force you to buy more reference materials than you can afford.

Oct 14 2011:
Nice possible Idea!! especially in developing/poverty stricken countries - Foreign Aid could be SO much more constructive and possibly almost eradicate or hugely reduced the need for aid to these countries...!